ENTRIES TAGGED "video"

A Kindle developer’s 2013 wishlist

Despite a huge leap forward there's still plenty of room for improvement

2012 was a good year for Kindle developers. With the unveiling of the first-generation Fire tablet in late 2011 and the release of the KF8 Mobi format in early 2012, designing beautiful ebooks for the Kindle platform became a reality. KF8 introduced a fixed-layout specification for Kindle Fire, which opened the door to graphically rich titles—children’s books, graphic novels—in Mobi format. KF8 also greatly increased CSS2 compliance for standard reflowable ebooks, implemented a handful of CSS3 features (text shadow, rounded borders), and added support for embedded fonts. The subsequent rollout of KF8 to Kindle eInk readers running firmware 3.4 (including the new Kindle Paperwhite) and KF8’s support for @media queries to enable fallback styling for non-KF8 devices helped to increase rendering parity within the diverse Kindle ecosystem.

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Graceful eBook Degradation

New approaches and tools are required to develop and present the highest fidelity content across devices

Remember the old days when print was the only format a publisher had to worry about? Now the minimum output requirements include PDF, mobi and EPUB. But what about the devices used to read those formats? You’ve got to consider eInk displays, mobile phones, tablets and computers.

We’re in the very early innings of the ebook game and our focus is mostly still on quick-and-dirty print-to-e conversions. That means the ebook pretty much renders the same way as the print book. Reading devices offer so much horsepower and presentation capabilities yet the vast majority of our content is nothing more than the printed page on a screen. Why?

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Pride and prejudice and book trailers

Pride and prejudice and book trailers

How Quirk Books puts book trailers to use and measures their success.

The literati may despise them, but book trailers can be effective marketing tools when done right. Brett Cohen, vice president of Quirk Books, discusses the production and tracking efforts behind his company's trailers.

Ebooks and the threat from "internal constituencies"

Lessons from adjacent media companies can inform publishers' ebook strategies.

Will internal constituencies bias how publishers value print book and ebook business models? Roger Magoulas examines that question and looks at the complementary relationship between print and electronic forms.

Michael Tamblyn's TOC Frankfurt presentation (actually a dramatic recreation thereof)

via blip.tv Shortcovers' Michael Tamblyn was kind enough to record his talk and slides from last month's TOC Frankfurt Conference. I got a lot of great hallway feedback about the session, and you'll see it's for good reason. Michael will also be speaking at TOC New York. Posted via web from TOC Posterous…

Video: Seth Godin on New Media and New Marketing

I got a note from our Conferences Web team saying that video from Seth Godin's 2008 talk at the TOC Conference is "generating more than normal buzz" over on our Blip.TV channel I was in the audience for this one, and it's worth a watch:…

Webcast Video: What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization

Below you'll find the full recording from the recent TOC Webcast, "What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization," with Liza Daly….

Webcast Video: Why Publishers Should Care About SEO

See the full video from the TOC Webcast: "Why Publishers Should Care About SEO," with SEO expert Jamie Low.

An On-Demand Night at the Opera

The Metropolitan Opera is letting its inner geek run free. Performances will soon be available as pay-per-stream feeds and subscription packages through The Met's Web site. From the New York Times: For $3.99 or $4.99 per streamed opera, users will have a six-hour window in which to listen to or watch a production, once it has started. A monthly…

Watch the YouTube Video, Buy the Product

YouTube's Content ID service, something we've covered in the past, gives publishers two options for handling unauthorized videos: the material can be removed from YouTube or it can be turned into advertising/revenue opportunities. An article in today's New York Times shows which option Google prefers — Content ID can now be used to associate "click-to-buy" links with video clips:…